Born Fighting Read online

  This brutal revolt invited and received a brutal response, but throughout its early stages the rebels did their best to steer clear of the Ulster Scots. There were good reasons for this approach. First, they knew the Scottish settlers were organized to fight and were able fighters. Second, they feared that Scotland itself, then positioned with a strong army across the North Channel of the Irish Sea in Cumberland, could send a portion of that army to protect fellow Presbyterians and decimate the rebellion. And third, in many ways the Covenanters in Scotland had actually inspired this Irish rebellion, and the Irish leaders wished to narrow the scope of their attacks to the English-dominated governing forces in Ulster. “Catholics or not, they had been inspired by Scottish pressure tactics. ‘The Scots have taught us our ABC’s.’ ”48

  Their approach failed horribly. The rebellion itself quickly spread beyond the intent of its originators until it did take on a heavily anti-Protestant tone, designed to attempt to drive the Ulster Plantation’s settlers back across the sea. Predictably, the Scottish settlements retaliated with ferocity. Many of the terrorized English did return home, particularly those of the less warlike mercantile classes who had come from London and the southern areas of England. And the end result of the uprising was a thorough hardening of the Protestant elements of Ulster, with a pronounced Scottish flavor and military approach.

  “By mid-1644,” Foster writes, “the Scots army in Ulster was effectively a Covenanting force, in arms for Parliament, against whom any royalist elements grudgingly stood down. . . . The vital importance of Scottish influences was further emphasized by the overspill of Scots refugees from the western Highlands to Ulster, many of whom stayed on. The events of the 1640s, which began with a threat to the Ulster Plantation, ended by solidifying the Scottish nature of the province.”49 Indeed, an Irish state paper in 1660 indicated that by then there were “not above 5,000 English in the whole province besides the army.”50

  English migrations to Ulster did pick up again in the late 1600s, particularly from the northern border areas next to Scotland, where many of the English emigrants shared the predominantly Celtic heritage of the Scots.51 Others, such as Puritans and Quakers, who, like the Scots, were “dissenting” Protestants in conflict with the “reformed” English Episcopacy and the Catholics, also trickled into Ulster during this period. They frequently joined the Presbyterian congregations, intermarried, and thus became part of the Scottish communities.52 As a consequence, despite their English antecedents, both of these groups tended to reinforce rather than detract from Scottish dominance of Ulster. In large measure they also account for the many English-origin surnames that show up among Americans of Scots-Irish descent. The “notion of Celtic kinship” was again well served, as the Scots characteristically absorbed the new immigrants.

  In the following decades this “solidifying the Scottish nature of the province” proved to be a formula for more rather than less tension in Ulster. While the Royalists during the English civil war had been opposed to the Scottish Calvinists, some forget that Cromwell’s Roundheads, whose anti-Irish sentiments are justly remembered for their uncontrolled viciousness, hated the Scottish Presbyterians with an equal passion. Indeed, in 1650, just months after he lopped off the head of Charles I, Cromwell led a notoriously brutal slash-and-burn “pacification” campaign throughout Ireland, putting sword and fire to Catholic and Presbyterian alike. Leyburn’s figures, derived from Sir William Petty, a statistician of that period, indicate that “out of a population in Ireland of 1,448,000, three-sevenths, or 616,000, perished by sword, famine and plague.” Of this number, 504,000 were Irish, meaning that more than 100,000 were not.53

  Further, when Charles II returned to the throne after Cromwell’s demise, he was convinced by his advisers to pass the first of a series of restrictive laws that eventually became known as the Test Acts. These acts were designed to produce an English government that was closely aligned with the Episcopal Church of England. As Churchill describes it: “Was not the Anglican Church the mainstay of the Throne? . . . The Corporation Act of 1661 required all persons holding municipal office to renounce the Solemn League and Covenant—a test which excluded many of the Presbyterians; to take the oath of non-resistance—which excluded Republicans; and to receive the sacrament according to the rites of the Church of England—which excluded Roman Catholics and some of the Nonconformists. The object of this act was to confine municipal office, closely connected to the election of members of Parliament, to Royalist Anglicans.”54

  Such restrictive laws ebbed and flowed over the following decades, both in their language and in the vigor of their enforcement in Ulster. But a particularly harsh version enacted by the newly crowned Queen Anne’s government in 1703 would be a strong catalyst for the Ulster Scots to finally decide that a better future awaited them in the American colonies. The 1703 Test Act was specifically aimed at subduing the dominant Presbyterian culture in Ulster, requiring that all officeholders in Ireland take the sacrament of the Anglican Church. It also eliminated the legitimacy of Presbyterian ministers, thereby removing the legality of marriage ceremonies, baptisms, and even burial rites. Thus, in the eyes of English law, the non-Anglican Ulster Scots had instantly become fornicators for having married outside the Anglican Church, and their children were now regarded as bastards. In many parts of Ulster the Presbyterians could not even conduct a burial ceremony unless an Episcopalian minister performed the service.

  In addition, Queen Anne’s Test Act forbade dissenting Protestants from teaching school, holding even minor positions in the government, or serving as officers in the militia. It would be more than twenty years, until the beginning of the reign of King George II, before this act was moderated. It would not be until 1755, more than fifty years later, that Presbyterians were allowed to again serve as officers in the militia. And the act would not be repealed until 1782—long after the great Scots-Irish migration to America that saw so many former Ulstermen take up arms willingly and effectively against the English government during the American Revolution.55

  Such seeds would bear predictable fruit, sown as they were among a people whose ancestors had never bent a knee to Rome, either in ancient or modern times. The insistence on such restrictive policies by London’s Anglican governors not only contributed heavily to the eventual migration from Ulster that began in 1715. It also inflamed the traditional Scottish contempt for central authority and caused the Ulster Scots to be known as the rebellious, argumentative, ever-combative “problem children” of Ulster.

  Indeed, a revealing term crept into the Anglican and English lexicon during this period. The Anglicans started to call themselves “conformist” Protestants while the Presbyterians—who were not religious Presbyterians in the modern sense, but rather were the forerunners of the fundamentalist Christian movement in the United States—were referred to as the “nonconformists.” And no better word can be found to describe the Scots-Irish political and social contribution in America, for they were to become America’s first radicals.

  The Presbyterian experiences in the new communities in Ireland made them even more uncompromising than those they had left behind in Scotland. In a less violent but still consistent backlash that mirrored the reaction of the Scots to Edward’s torture of William Wallace, Henry VIII’s “rough wooing,” and Charles I’s attempt to force them into Episcopacy, the edicts from above only made the Ulster Scots more intransigent. As Leyburn points out, they were now fully convinced of “the superiority of the Presbyterian Church to any order a king might make that curbed or thwarted it, . . . that there is a justification for revolt against authority . . . [and that] the principle of revolution may also apply to the individual.”56

  Foster agrees, commenting that “the denial of their civil rights and the bitter antipathy felt for them by the Church of Ireland set them in a mould that was firmly antiestablishment in more ways than one. . . . The Presbyterian political culture was always ready to withdraw compliance from authority; their loyalty was c
onditional. . . . This helps account for the special odium in which Ulster Presbyterians were held; points could be stretched for Huguenots and Quakers . . . but in the Ulster context, fundamentalism, though attacked in every generation, tended to win out. ‘No temporizing’ in theology was joined with ‘no surrender’ in politics. Thus, despite their role in 1688–1691, the Ulster Dissenters’ interest remained against the government.”57

  This “role in 1688–1691” was principally military. Without the hard backbone of the Ulster Scots during those years, the preservation of English rule in Ulster would almost certainly have been lost. And further, the military victories of that period thwarted a serious attempt by James II to regain the British throne from William II. That the newly crowned Queen Anne could so cavalierly disregard these contributions barely ten years later when she imposed the draconian restrictions of her Test Acts was a clear—and final—signal to the Ulster Scots that the Episcopal English aristocracy could never be trusted. As in so many other cases when it came to London, their assistance was vital during times of crisis, but a Presbyterian ascendancy on their own terms was viewed as an unacceptable threat.

  To fully comprehend why Queen Anne’s Test Acts culminated in such overwhelming bitterness and self-imposed cultural isolation, it is crucial to read her decision to impose the acts against the military turmoil that immediately preceded them. And the key symbolic event of the 1688–1691 period was the siege of Londonderry. Although not a great military battle in historical terms, the 105-day siege of Ulster’s second-most-important city called upon the courage and tenacity of men, women, and children alike.

  The Londonderry siege was not the only successful defensive effort by Protestants in Ulster as Ireland fought out its own battles in the wake of the deposition of James II. Foster writes of “equally successful, if less spectacular resistance” throughout the province during this time.58 But in it the Ulster Scots found an allegorical microcosm for all the ills and betrayals that had haunted them throughout the turbulent century since they had left lowland Scotland. Many Catholic Irish allied themselves with a great European power in an attempt to expel them. The English rulers in London urged them on and then failed to support them through their most critical hours of need. The Anglican elite in Ireland minimized their contribution once the siege had been lifted. And hardly a decade later, a new English queen sought to cut them away from governmental, educational, military, and even religious power in the very province in which their numbers and culture had become clearly dominant.

  In the end the siege reinforced the notion that the Ulster Scots were an isolated people who could depend only on each other. And its aftermath convinced many of them that they no longer belonged in Ireland’s increasingly toxic ethnic mix.

  4

  Londonderry. The Boyne. Exodus.

  WHEN WILLIAM OF Orange ascended the British throne in December 1688, it brought a quick reaction from Louis XIV of France. The most powerful ruler in Europe viewed the succession of a Dutch Protestant to the English crown as a dramatic shift in the balance of power and a threat to French influence in overall European affairs. Louis immediately threw his weight behind the exiled King James II, receiving him with great fanfare in France and providing him with extensive military supplies, financing, and a large contingent of French soldiers in an effort to help him regain his throne.

  James then left for Ireland, arriving in March 1689 and setting up a regency in Dublin as a first step toward ousting William of Orange. In May, England reacted to this and other provocations by declaring war against France, and sent an eight-thousand-man army to do battle with the French in Flanders. The forces under James were now viewed by the English not only as an army rebelling in Ireland, but also as wartime allies of the French. And in that sense the situation in Ireland became a replay of Hugh O’Neill’s rebellion of almost exactly a hundred years before, with the French taking the place of the Spanish in their desires to flank England by creating a second front on the island.

  As Churchill wrote, in Ireland, James “was welcomed as a deliverer. He reigned in Dublin, aided by an Irish Parliament, and was soon defended by a Catholic army which may have reached a hundred thousand men. The whole island except the Protestant settlements in the North passed under the control of the Jacobites, as they were henceforth called. While William looked eastward to Flanders and the Rhine the eyes of his Parliament were fixed upon the opposite quarter. When he reminded Parliament of Europe they vehemently drew his attention to Ireland. The King made the time-honoured mistake of meeting both needs inadequately.”59

  Those loyal to James II had been active during his brief reign and had engaged in military pursuits even prior to his arrival in Ireland from France. When James became king, he had appointed Richard Talbot, the earl of Tyrconnell, as his lord deputy in Ireland. Tyrconnell came from long-established Anglo-Irish stock and was charged with bringing Catholics to positions of importance in Ireland. He had focused on the legal system and especially the military, which became the “cutting edge of the policy of Catholicization.”60 This allowed Tyrconnell not only to eliminate Protestants from key positions in the army, but also to station Catholic-dominated troops in almost every key location in Ulster. Unlike the rebellion of 1641, this action was legal, under the imprimatur of the Crown. Thus, even as the English Parliament sought to oust James II from the throne, Catholic military strongholds dominated the cities and towns of the Ulster Plantation.

  In late 1688, as William approached from Holland, a nationwide revolt against James had broken out in England. But in the Catholic parts of Ireland, similar revolts had broken out to protest against William. By early 1689, William’s usurpation of James was still unaccepted in Catholic Ireland, while the Protestant areas were refusing to support James’s regency in Dublin. The province fell into chaos as Tyrconnell declared them rebels and rampaged though the countryside. Protestants “in the line of march of the army pulled down their houses, burnt and destroyed what they could not take with them, and fled to the fortified towns” of Enniskillen, Coleraine, and especially Londonderry. Between the punitive acts of Tyrconnell’s army and the scorched earth policies of the colonists themselves, Londonderry County became so desolate that, in the eyes of one French officer, it was “like traveling through the deserts of Arabia.”61

  Wild rumors were flying about Catholic intentions. A widely circulated letter predicting a replay of 1641’s massacres created a panic. Soon the city’s usual population of 2,000 had burgeoned to 7,000 soldiers and as many as 30,000 refugees. The standoff at Londonderry quickly became the focal point of the revolt, on both sides. As the months passed, a large force of Irish and French troops gathered outside the city’s stone walls, calling for its capitulation.

  Londonderry—historically and more properly known as Derry, still a sore point among many Irish—was no stranger to conflict. Located in the far north of Ireland where the River Foyle meets a wide, seaworthy Lough of the same name, Derry had been for centuries an accessible safe harbor when ships hit bad weather on the stormy North Atlantic. Founded by the famous missionary St. Columba in A.D. 546, the town was long known for Catholic landmarks that included an ancient cathedral, the Teampul Mor, erected in 1164, a Cistercian nunnery built in 1218, a Dominican abbey and church built in 1274, an Augustinian friary and church, and a Franciscan friary. Its churches and abbeys plus its accessibility from the nearby sea also made Derry an easy target for plunderers. The Danes sacked its churches and burned the city numerous times during the ninth and tenth centuries, followed by the Anglo-Normans, who found it a frequent and choice target throughout the twelfth. For centuries thereafter, Derry became both a favored destination for plundering Irish tribes and a headquarters for others. Between 1560 and 1604 the city was twice laid to ruins during Irish rebellions.

  In 1613, with the settlement of the Ulster Plantation, the English renamed the city Londonderry and over the next six years built a redoubtable series of walls around it that exist to this day. Du
ring the rebellion of 1641, seven heavily Scottish regiments whose soldiers were taken from nearby farms and townships defended the city. In 1649, as Cromwell closed in on the hapless King Charles I in London, Londonderry endured a partial siege that lasted several months, largely because the Ulster Scots in and around it had been aligned with the Scottish Covenanters against the king. And now, as troops loyal to James II wreaked havoc through Ulster, the thick stone walls of Londonderry were the reason the people of the countryside poured into the city. They were also the reason that the soldiers under James could not forcefully attack it. And thus began the longest and most famous siege in modern British history.

  The standoff began on December 7, 1688, with the arrival of a Catholic contingent that had been ordered by Tyrconnell to occupy the city. As the soldiers approached, thirteen young apprentices grabbed the keys of the city from a guard and closed the city gates, locking the army out. The army remained and steadily grew. Those inside the city, recently supplied arms and munitions by an English ship, organized its defense and fought. The resulting standoff would not end until August 1, 1689, nearly nine months later, although heavy fighting did not begin until late April. More than seven thousand men, women, and children would perish, some from the siege guns and others through disease and starvation.

  James II elevated the importance of Londonderry in April. Having just arrived in Ireland, the deposed king marched his heavily French army to the city, reinforcing Tyrconnell’s contingent. On April 18, during a cease-fire, the king approached the city gates and offered terms of surrender to the besieged Protestants. His answer was a barrage of cannon and musket fire that killed an officer and several soldiers near him, and a chorus that became the battle cry of those inside.